See What's There
by Jayrunner
Summary: In a transmutation gone wrong, Sora was left with a chimera-like body, alchemic talent to frighten the Elric brothers, and the ability to see what no one else can. He can teach them what no one knows, in return for his mind. What could go wrong?


A/N: This is my first fanfic that I've published, and it involves more of the Fullmetal Alchemist world than the actual characters. Please enjoy, but be nice! Don't leave me any mean reviews about lack of known characters or anything. K, thanks, enjoy!

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"It won't last, you know," I sang to myself, eyes on the ceiling. I smiled, rocking back and forth on the spot and muttering to myself. "Once you realize everything that happened is fake, it will all disappear," I added. "Disappear, disappear, disappear . . . Disappear. Disappear, disappear." I couldn't tell if I was alone or if I was surrounded by people. If I was in a room with a hundred other people, I couldn't tell if they would find me crazy or nod and accept what I said to be true. I just rocked back and forth, smiling, eyes on the ceiling, singing to myself. "Disappear," I agreed to myself.

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"How long have you been having these dreams?" the bespectacled young woman asked me, fidgeting with a notepad.

"I told you, they're not dreams," I replied, staring at the floor and trying to ignore her wide-eyed stare.

"Then what are they?" she whispered, her wide eyes growing even wider.

"I think you're the one that needs therapy, not me," I muttered. She didn't seem to hear me, just staring at me with those wide eyes. I couldn't help glancing up from the floor every once in a while, meeting those insane, bulging eyes the color of ice. I flinched deeper into the squashy couch, trying to escape from her mad, terrifying gaze.

"They're not dreams," I repeated, my voice a little weaker as I fought to explain myself. "They're just things that I see. During the day. Like, when I'm walking around, I see things that other people don't. No one else can tell, but they're there. I can see them."

"How do you know that they are there?" the woman hissed, her wide blue eyes stretching so far that she no longer looked like she was in her twenties. She looked like she could easily be in her sixties. "Do you have any proof? What if they are just hallucinations?"

"They're not hallucinations!" I spat venomously, showing an emotion besides fear and boredom for the first time all day. "I know that they're not! The other people just can't see them! They're blind!" The woman's eyes narrowed to dangerous slits, a look that better fit her features. She looked almost like a cat about to attack a mouse, or a snake poised to strike.

"Do you have proof that they exist?" she asked me, leaning forward in her chair and clutching her knees with her red talons. I met her stare head on. I was not afraid, and never would be afraid, of anyone that tried to stare at me with narrowed eyes. Narrowed eyes were a sign of fear or subordination in some animal species, while wide eyes reflected madness and rage in them. It was a terrifying aspect of my animal nature. I stared back, my fingers tapping out a slow, sad rhythm on my knee. I paused, inspecting the ceiling, before answering.

"I know that they exist because the animals can see them too," I told her, smiling softly and letting a dreamy, airy quality enter my tone. My voice was much higher than normal, higher than a boy's voice should be. It was a ruse, trying to coax a different reaction out of the woman. She'd been hired to discover what was wrong with my brain, and she wasn't going to go anywhere with intimidation or false insanity. I wasn't stupid, nor mad. I could play her mind games.

"Really," she replied, smiling as if to say 'Now we're getting somewhere!' She removed her glasses and stared at me, her eyes less piercing without the glass to magnify her gaze. "What kinds of animals? And how do you know that they see them?"

"Cats, mostly, but I've seen dogs and birds see them too. And ants won't crawl where they've been." I traced whirls in the ceiling with my eyes, humming a Russian song under my breath. The woman waited for me to continue, and when I didn't, she prompted me with more questioning, her voice growing softer.

"How do you know that they see them? What if it's just a coincidence? Maybe your mind is making up excuses for why animals are wary of certain places."

"I know that they've seen them, because they told me so. Not the ants or the birds, or the dogs, but the cats have. They tell me." I started to mumble the English words to the song, eager to be home so that I could try to avoid the dangerous things that I saw.

"They talk to you?" she pressed, leaning forward.

"I won't elaborate," I told her, my voice returning to it's normal tones. "You won't understand, because we're not alike, you and I. If you want to know anything about what I've seen, you're going to have to earn my trust and wait patiently, like everyone else."

The woman stared at me for a good three minutes, trying to lift the words from my tongue with her gaze alone. I stared back, my eyes half closed, as if to tell her that I really didn't care either way. Her eyes struggled, her will trying to bend mine, but I wouldn't let up. Just because she was a therapist didn't mean she could get answers from her patients.

"What is that song?" she asked, finally deciding that she wouldn't get another word out of me.

I curled my knees up to my chest, tracing a pattern on the material of my pants as I answered. "It's called Brothers," I informed her in a whisper. "It's so sad. That's why I like it."

"Will you sing it for me?" she asked quietly, sounding almost concerned. I thought about it for a second, then replied with a single word:

"No."

"Please? I've never heard of it before. I'd like to hear it very much."

"Why should I sing it for you? You don't even know if I can sing or not. What if I have a terrible voice and your eardrums burst?"

"That's a risk I'm willing to take. Please, I would very much like to hear the song."

I paused, thinking some more. It wouldn't hurt to sing just a little bit to her, and then maybe she'd be quiet for a little while, or at least stop asking questions.

"Alright," I murmured, looking up at her through my lashes. I waited until she had turned her eyes away from me before starting in with my song.

"How can I repay you, brother mine?

How can I expect you to forgive?

Clinging to the past I shed our blood,

and shattered your chance to live.

Though I knew the laws I paid no heed.

How can I return your wasted breath?

What I did not know has cost you dear,

for there is no cure for death.

Beautiful mother, soft and sweet,

Once you were gone we were not complete.

Back through the years we reached for you,

alas, twas not meant to be!

And how can I make amends

for all that I took from you?

I led you with hopeless dreams.

My brother, I was a fool."

[[ Lyrics credited to Tobu Ishi!!! ]]

I stared at the floor, tracing the patterns on my leg, letting the melancholy words sink in. The woman was silent, and I could sense that she was a little deflated. I couldn't quite understand why, and I didn't really want to know, either. It was such a sad song, so melancholy, but that was why I couldn't seem to let it go. It was such a happier song then my own life, the comparison like candy to rotting meat. I smiled, knowing that whoever's life it was that the song was about couldn't have had such a terrible time.

"Sora-kun, do you want to tell me about this song?" the woman asked gently, reaching out to touch my knee gently. I knew she was trying to comfort me, but I didn't want her to touch me. I shrank into her cushions pulling my knees close to my chest and staring at her over them. She blinked, and I could see pity in her eyes. When I'd first entered her therapy room, less than twenty minutes before, she'd thought I was just a child that needed help getting over loss or hallucinated. She'd never expected to get me, with my strange body, depression, and angsty teenage attitude.

"I just want to go home," I told her truthfully. I didn't want to have to stay her for forty more minutes, having this woman dissect and bisect my life, cutting into every little bubble of hurt and releasing a spray of my blood into the air. I didn't want her to have any hold on me, and pity was the thing I desired the least.

The woman sighed, glancing at her watch. "We don't have to stay here for the rest, if you don't want to. We have quite a bit of time left, and we can go somewhere else to talk. Maybe you can show me some of your alchemy?" She was trying to make me happier, to relieve some of the pain that she thought I had. I thought it over for several seconds, then nodded and rose to my feet.

The therapist, whose name I had forgotten after only that short period of time, lead me from the room, down the stairs, and out of the stuffy office building. Central was bright around us, people walking and talking and going about their lives. I pulled my hood up over my head, almost in self-defense, and followed the woman as she lead me down the street to a café. It was one of those places that you didn't see very often in the city, where you could sit at the outdoor bar and watch the people make your food. The woman sat down on a stool, so I sat next to her, trying to ignore the feeling that I was being stared at.

"Take your hood off, Sora-kun," my therapist scolded, reaching up for my hood. I ducked my head and let her pull the fabric from my head, wincing as several more pairs of eyes sent prickles up my spine. Even in a place where there were so many strange people, I stood out like a sore thumb.

"Mommy, look, that boy's wearing funny things on his head, like a kitty," a little girl told her mother across the street. I flattened my ears to my head, embarrassed by the spectacle. I didn't like being out on the street for this reason, but there was no turning back now. The people kept moving about their business, no one stopping to ask me about my strange ears or just to stare openly. I was able to slowly pull my eyes from the floor, to lift my ears back to their normal positions, and I had to agree with the little girl. I did have strange ears, like a cat. They were pointed and furry and swiveled to catch noises that normal people couldn't hear. I also had the cat tail, though I had that coiled beneath my over-sized jacket. I looked like someone had transmuted a cat with a human, making a pointless chimera. But I wasn't. I'd been born this way. It wasn't alchemy, it was just a mutation. I was normal.

"Hey, Kitty Boy," a voice said several seats over. I hated that name so much. I wanted to start screaming at whoever had been dumb enough to call me that, but was able to reign in my temper before turning to face him. It was a guy about my age, around nineteen, with blond hair in a braid and oddly golden eyes. They were the exact same color as my own, much to my surprise.

"What do you want?" I sighed, exasperated. He looked me over, seeming to make a connection in his mind, and his next answer had me infuriated.

"What are you, a chimera?"

"Don't call me a chimera!" I snarled, golden eyes blazing. I felt my pupils narrowing to angry slits, my incisors sliding out of their fleshy sheaths into angry fangs. "Look, shorty, I'm not a chimera. Why does everyone always think that?" The shorty comment had him in a rage, and he started yelling instantly.

"Who're you calling a runt so small you could step on without even seeing him?!" he exclaimed, looking like he wanted to attack and gut me. A brunette on his other side, taller than him but visibly a year or two younger, grabbed onto his right arm but continued eating his pie. There was something strange about him, like a thin veil of mist surrounded him.

"Al, let me go!" he complained. The boy he called Al shook his head, looking like a mother punishing her child. "Brother, he only called you short because you called him a chimera! Leave him alone." Al glanced at me over his brother's shoulder, smiling apologetically.

"Sorry about that. This is my brother, Ed, and he'd kind of touchy about his height," Al explained. I stared back blankly, no emotion on my face. Al stared back for several seconds, his gaze growing uncomfortable. My eyes widened as I realized why he looked so foggy to me: there were flickers of darkness surrounding his body, reaching out through the abnormal mist to lick at him, almost like flames. I'd seen that strange pattern before, swallowing the dead bodies of animals. When my mother and father had died, their coffins had been engulfed in the black fire and mist. It was the abnormality of someone who's dead, or supposed to be.

"You're not supposed to be here," I told him. He stared back, alarmed. I could smell his fear, his alarm, coming off of his body in waves. "You were supposed to be dead," I added, in case he'd misunderstood. Both of the brothers turned to stare at me, the older brother almost looking like he wanted to protect Al from me.

"What do you mean?" Ed growled, his eyes darting around as if worried that someone would overhear.

"He's supposed to be dead," I told him blankly. "He should be, but he's not."

Al shuddered, and I watched in surprise as the darkness managed to crawl through the mist and engulf him, the mist to thicken. Ed turned to him in shock, his face covered in fear and worry, and then he flew at me. "What did you do to my brother?!" he gasped, trying to grab onto my jacket. I hopped backwards nimbly, darting out of his reach when he almost had his hands on me.

"I didn't do a thing," I told him truthfully. "He was supposed to be dead, and now the darkness came to take him back," I explained. He should be dead, but he wasn't. People the should be dead need to die. You aren't supposed to keep people from dieing, or the flow of the world is disrupted. People have to die.

"Bring him back!" Ed pleaded. I paused; I was reminded of the haunting song, of the brothers that had sacrificed everything. These two were so much like them. I had to help him. It made perfect sense.

I swooped in next to Al, who lay convulsing on the sidewalk. I ignored the people on the sidewalk and the street, staring in surprise and horror at our performance. I moved my fingers through the fog quickly, parting it with my fingertips to create a transmutation circle. Then I pressed both hands to the boy's chest and watched as the darkness shriveled away into the receding mist. And then they were gone, no longer tracing Al's outline in a thin edge of roiling black heat.

"Alchemy?" Ed murmured as Al slowly sat up, rubbing the back of his head. I rocked back onto my heels, letting out a breath I'd been holding. This boy didn't have to have the black and the mist eat him. He didn't have to die. Only the people that the flow marked with the black and the mist had to die. This boy didn't have the mist. He could live.

"You really gotta be careful when you reconnect the soul with the mind and body," I told Ed. "If you make a single mistake the soul won't bond all the way, and it could get ripped off after a while. He should be normal now, though. He won't die naturally until he's ancient now. No more soul-ripping."

"How did you do that?" Ed asked, awestruck. I stared at him blankly. "Do what?" He stomped his boot and whispered, "How did you bring him back to life?"

I contemplated that for a heartbeat. It's not like it was particularly hard. All I'd done was use alchemy to blur the edges between the boy's mind and body. As long as his mind was intact his soul couldn't part with the body, and the mind was already firmly attached to the body, so the three wouldn't separate until death. The soul had been so separate and distinct, as if it had been sharpened and refined for a long time away from the body, and he'd merely dulled it down.

I repeated that to Ed, down to the last detail. He couldn't seem to grasp the actual context of my words, for some reason, as if he couldn't fathom how to blur the edges of a seemingly perfect object. I shook my head and muttered, "You wouldn't understand. No one but me does."

"Sora-kun! What happened?" the therapist asked, kneeling beside me. I hadn't even noticed her absence. She'd been back to her office, missing the whole exchange of alchemy and dieing. I patted her shoulder blankly, all expression gone from my body now.

"I saved this guy's life and tried to explain my alchemy to shorty," I told her, my voice devoid of any inflection or tone. She glanced at Al, her eyes skimming over Ed, who was fuming, and then her gaze returned to me. She beamed at me and threw her arms around my neck. I patted her back, wondering when we'd gone from crazy patient and pitying therapist to good enough friends to allow hugging. Oh, well. I could use this to my advantage later, get out of therapy for a "date."

I stood up, helping her to her feet, and threw a parting glance at the brothers. People on the sidewalks were whispering excitedly and staring at me as I walked away. The woman wrapped her arms around my left arm, glancing back at the two boys. I glanced back at them over my shoulder, allowing myself a smirk at their awed faces. They were probably alchemists themselves - it would explain how Al had been surrounded by Death's Touch - and were surprised to find an alchemist more powerful than them. I turned my head back to face the front, suddenly feeling very confident with myself. I let my tail fall down from beneath my jacket, flicking it out. I drank in the stares, the attention, enjoying myself. I'd kept my alchemic talents to myself ever since I'd discovered them as a child. I could do just about anything if I set my mind to it, including bring back the dead and transmute anything with just the elements in the air, but I'd never used it for anyone but my mother and father. And when they'd died I'd only used my alchemy to help animals and to let out some of the feelings of abandonment that I'd had for over ten years. The power that I felt from using my alchemy for other people felt so good. So very good.

I smiled wickedly to myself. This could indeed be fun.


End file.
